The Third Generation Partnership Project (“3GPP”) is in the process of defining various communication protocols necessary for an evolving 3GPP cellular network standard, nicknamed “LTE”. As shown in FIG. 1, to which reference is now made, two operation channels, among many, have been defined for the uplink (i.e., the link where a mobile unit 14, dubbed “user equipment” or UE in the LTE standard, transmits to its serving base station 10, or eNodeB in the LTE standard). One channel is a physical uplink channel for data 18, called the PUSCH, and the other channel is a physical uplink channel for control 16, called the PUCCH. Both data and control signals may pass on data channel 18, but control channel 16 is reserved for control signals only and is designed to work from the farthest reaches of each cell 12 (i.e. from the furthest possible distances from each base station 10) and under very poor conditions.
Many different signals have been defined. One is a CQI (channel quality indicator) report with which each UE 14 informs its serving base station 10 of the quality of the downlink channel, i.e. of the propagation channel from base 10 to UE 14. Conventionally, the CQI report may be sent on the uplink control channel, PUCCH.
In the context of emerging LTE standards, it has been recently suggested that control reports (such as the CQI reports) may be sent on the data channel. However, the structure of control reports intended for the control channel cannot be readily copied to the data channel because the two channels operate differently.